Within the United States, 'mixed race' has gained currency as a loaded but culturally comprehensible term referencing individuals where one parent is white and the other is of color. Some […] challenge this approach and claim recognition for 'mixed-race' identities that were never legally proscribed. It is a strategic but frivolous petition as the explicit legacy of Anglo-European slavery and colonialism, which gave birth to the ominous idea of race in the first place, facilitated the abhorrent notions of miscegenation, hybridity, and mixed race. Efforts to expand the discourse of 'mixed race' to include any combination that abridges diverse ethnic/ national origin – e.g., Chinese-Chicano, Southeast Indian and Iranian – seem rather disingenuous given the mating history of humankind. Scholarship on the impact of contemporary demographic changes and their impact on mixed identities per se must not confuse the historical particularity of mixed race. Again – more, not less, clarity and precision is needed and the appealing notion of third-ness, a separate space defined for mixedness, still confuses the challenges of racial ambiguity with panethnic mixing between minority communities.

The presentation argues that mulattoes became negroes in the 1930 census because white Americans feared that black people were secretly among them, passing for white. Furthermore, it argues that the census change did not end the practice of racial passing or diminish white Americans fascination with it and fear of this act.